Waaaay OT: OpenSolaris

[Davis Johnson]

Hoover, Tony wrote:

>Can someone tell me what advantages a "REAL" Unix kernel like OpenSolaris
>has over Linux?  Has anyone else thought of compiling OpenSolaris on Alpha?
>  
>
My general experience is that Solaris is better in ways that never seem 
to matter to me. Things like hot swappable processors and memory, which 
I don't have the hardware for and which look like a solution looking for 
a problem.

Linux is better in ways that DO matter to me, like driver and 
applications availability.

Solaris is sometimes reputed to be more reliable. Where I work we have 
Linux, Solaris-on-intel (a few on SPArc) and even a dwindling few SCO 
openserver systems in production. For all three (yes, even SCO) the 
major cause of OS downtime is annual UPS maintenance. I can't say that 
any of them realy have a reliability edge.

Solaris 10 sounds like it has some nifty security features. They might 
be worth a try.  Some of them might help us get away from our current 
"just slap another 1U in the rack" approach to dooing things.

As far as I can tell if you want to use Solaris you are probably going 
to need to install a laundry list of packages (that will all look 
familiar to anybody on this list) from http://sunfreeware.com

I am not a nutral observer. There are a thousand little things I don't 
like about Solaris. Most of them are extremly petty. For example, the 
standard solaris tar doesn't understand any compression options, tar 
-xvzf or tar -xvjf doesn't work. A great many of these issues can be 
solved by instaling everything at http://sunfreeware.com , but it is 
easier to just run linux if you want a GNU userspace.

What was the original question?  Yea, I thought of it briefly, no I 
wasn't interested.